Stayed up til 3AM last night recording all the notes on my Edgley (accordion reeded) and Carroll (concertina reeded) concertinas, turned them into individual note mapped samples for my software synthesizer on the PC. Once turned into samples, I can play them in realtime with the Wakker AMC-30 MIDI concertina.

Here's a couple of quick tests of the Frankenstina simulating four different instruments:

http://www.tradlessons.com/frankenstina_demos.mp3

also on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4quFimqQEE

1) Simulated Edgley C-G

2) Simulated Edgley A-E (for playing with pipes in B, also put together a simulated Bb-F for playing with pipes in C)

3) Simulated Carroll C-G

4) Simulated Carroll A-E

Not bad for a first try, still a lot of room for improvement. I'd say good enough for playing in flat piping sessions at this point, which was the original purpose of this whole exercise.

Along with the velocity and volume control curve remapping, I'm also using the key number to modulate the pan, simulating the moving of the notes from the left to the right of the concertina.

All this runs on a laptop, the whole setup is, as a result, quite portable...

After our Saturday night potluck/session/party, MTGuru was kind enough to allow me to record every note in every reed bank of his Saltarelle B/C box to construct a virtual button accordion.

Here's a test recording using the AMC-30 playing combinations of one, two, and three reed banks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37xP-505qjc

(should be live by midnight PST)

So, Michael, are you going to be sampling your pipes any time soon?

_________________
Bill

"... you discover that everything is just right: the drones steady and sonorous, the regulators crisp and tuneful and the chanter sweet and responsive. ... I really look forward to those five or six days every year." Robbie Hannan

No, I'm just focusing on concertina and button accordion emulation.

Here's some photos of the final setup, has a bit of "James Bond" feel to it:

http://www.pbase.com/eskin/frankenstina

Click on the thumbnails for the full size images.

Setup is very quick and simple. Once its up and running, you can close up the case and just play for up to 4 hours on batteries, the limit is the battery life of the laptop.

I actually saw Mike's Frankenstina yesterday at our pipers club meeting. An amazing machine.

Yesterday was the first real life test of the setup with flat pipes in C and in B and the setup worked very well and blended in quite nicely with the pipes.

One thing I hadn't anticipated as a huge advantage of a virtual instrument over a real one is the ability to adjust tuning to match the flat set. For example, there was about a 1/4 step delta between the various B sets yesterday, I was able to setup two patches with different small tuning offsets. On the wireless controller, I'm able to switch between them with the channel enable buttons. That just isn't an option with a real A/E.

Howdy howdy,

I was just wondering if you could comment on the feel of the MIDI box, i.e. its responsiveness and accuracy relative to regular concertinas.

Caj

Sure thing... Since its based on a standard Wakker anglo concertina, it does feel like playing a normal instrument, the primary difference is that there is considerably less air flow, and less bellows travel required than you might be used to on an acoustic instrument. I'm exchanging some emails with Wim to see if I can increase the amount of air flowing so it will feel identical to my acoustic instruments. I recently had the instrument open doing an adjustment and when I was testing it with only two of the end bolts installed, even though there was a lot of air leaking through the sides, the instrument played perfectly well, so I believe that with some minor modifications to the end inserts (there are card inserts behind the grill work, I think to reduce the airflow), it could be made to feel more like a true acoustic. Also, on mine, since its brand new, the bellows are still on the stiff side, so as they loosen up it will become easier to play.

As far as responsiveness, that depends entirely on the samples and the scripting on virtual synth running on the laptop. The concertina itself just puts out MIDI note on/off and volume controller messages. How that translates to the final sound and expressive response and nuance is completely dependent on my ability to use that data as raw input to per note and per controller scripts to provide the sorts of modulations of volume, timbre, attack, etc. applied to the recorded samples. All this happens in realtime with zero detectable latency. I'm pretty happy with the overall feel and responsiveness I've been able to get so far.

And not to forget your walking range is about 50 feet unless something metalic gets in the way.

Yes, that makes possible some very interesting gags...